Dino De Laurentiis: The Pasta Seller Who Bought Hollywood
At the 1957 Academy Awards, *La Strada* won Best Foreign Language Film — and on a unique occasion in Oscar history the producers' names had been included in the nomination, so it was Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti who collected the statuette, not the director, Federico Fellini. It is the perfect origin myth for a man who spent sixty years insisting that the person who assembles the money and the risk is as much the author of a film as the person who calls action.
Torre Annunziata
De Laurentiis was born on 8 August 1919 in Torre Annunziata, in the Kingdom of Italy, and grew up selling spaghetti from his father's pasta factory — a detail he never stopped deploying, because it explained everything about how he did business. His brother Luigi, born in 1917, later became a producer too. He enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome in 1937, but the Second World War interrupted his studies. He produced his first film, *L'ultimo Combattimento*, in 1941, at twenty-two, and founded Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica in 1946.
Neorealism, and the Ponti Partnership
Through the late 1940s and 1950s he worked with Carlo Ponti on the films that gave postwar Italian cinema its international standing: *Bitter Rice* (1949), which made a star of his future wife Silvana Mangano; *La Strada* (1954); *Nights of Cabiria* (1956). This is the part of the résumé that is usually forgotten in the later noise about giant apes. For a decade De Laurentiis was the money behind Fellini.
Building a Studio, Losing a Studio
In the 1960s he built his own studio facilities outside Rome and produced on a scale that matched the ambition: *Barabbas* (1961), the enormous *The Bible: In the Beginning...* (1966), and in 1968 both *Barbarella* and *Danger: Diabolik*, two films that between them account for a substantial fraction of what the late sixties looked like in retrospect. The studio collapsed financially in the 1970s. He moved his headquarters to New York in 1973 and started over in a country whose language he had not mastered.
America
The American run was ferocious. *The Valachi Papers* (1972), *Serpico* (1973), *Death Wish* (1974), *Three Days of the Condor* (1975), *The Shootist* (1976), and the same year the remake of *King Kong* — a production whose scale and publicity became a genre of story in itself. Then *Orca* (1977), Bergman's *The Serpent's Egg* (1977), *Hurricane* (1979), *Flash Gordon* (1980), *Ragtime* (1981), *Halloween II* (1981), *Conan the Barbarian* (1982), *The Dead Zone* (1983), *Dune* and *The Bounty* (1984).
He became a United States citizen in 1986, having lived there since 1976, and held Italian and American citizenship jointly. In the 1980s he built the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group in Wilmington, North Carolina — a genuine studio in an improbable place — which produced *Cat's Eye* and *Silver Bullet* (1985), *Manhunter*, *Blue Velvet*, *King Kong Lives* and *Maximum Overdrive* (all 1986), and *Evil Dead II* (1987). That two-year stretch contains one of the most admired American films of the decade and two of the most derided, financed by the same man out of the same building. He formed Dino De Laurentiis Communications in Beverly Hills in 1990, produced *Army of Darkness* (1992) and *Breakdown* (1997), and ended his career with the Hannibal Lecter cycle: *Hannibal* (2001), *Red Dragon* (2002), *Hannibal Rising* (2007).
The Grocery Store
In the mid-1980s he opened DDL Foodshow, a chain of Italian specialty food halls — two in New York, one in Beverly Hills — with the first at the Endicott Hotel on the Upper West Side in November 1982. An assistant manager said the opening "was like the premiere of a movie." The critic Gael Greene savaged it, then conceded it was "probably the most stunningly handsome grocery in the world, certainly in New York," before identifying the flaw: "the pricing was insane. They hadn't paid enough attention to the competition." De Laurentiis reckoned it would break even at $75,000 to $80,000 a week; his successor Hans W. Pauli put the real figure closer to $200,000. It never made a profit and closed within two years. It is the whole man in miniature: enormous ambition, gorgeous execution, arithmetic performed last.
Family
His brief first Italian marriage was annulled. In 1949 he married the Italian-British actress Silvana Mangano; they had four children — Veronica, an author and actress; Raffaella, a producer; Federico, a producer who died in a plane crash in 1981; and Francesca — and divorced in 1988, a year before Mangano died of lung cancer. In 1990 he married the American producer Martha Schumacher, with whom he had two daughters, Carolyna and Dina; she died of cancer in 2021. His granddaughter through Veronica is the chef Giada De Laurentiis; his nephew, through Luigi, is the producer Aurelio De Laurentiis.
Why Dino Is Called a Genius
The quality in question is appetitive rather than artistic, and worth naming precisely: an almost pathological tolerance for risk combined with an unusually catholic eye for what an audience might want. He produced or co-produced more than five hundred films; thirty-eight of his Hollywood pictures received Academy Award nominations. No producer of comparable output moved so freely between registers. The man who financed Fellini's *Nights of Cabiria* also made *Maximum Overdrive*; the man who backed Bergman's *The Serpent's Egg* also made *King Kong Lives*. Most producers find a lane; De Laurentiis appears to have regarded lanes as a failure of nerve. His single finest act of judgment may be *Blue Velvet* — handing David Lynch, fresh from the commercial catastrophe of De Laurentiis's own *Dune*, complete freedom on a small budget.
The counter-case is that this is constitution, not genius. He did not write, direct or edit; the artistry in his catalogue belongs to Fellini, Lynch, Lumet, Cronenberg, Mann. His hit rate was poor, and his one producing Oscar came through a scoring quirk that took the statuette out of Fellini's hands. He lost a studio in the 1970s and a fortune on a grocery store because he would not check competitors' prices. What survives is real: persuading people to give money to strangers with unproven ideas, for six decades, on two continents, in a second language.
Legacy
He received the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1957 for *La Strada*, the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award from the Academy in 2001, and, posthumously in 2012, the America Award from the Italy-USA Foundation. He died in Beverly Hills on 10 November 2010, aged ninety-one. His most enduring lesson to the industry is one it keeps forgetting: the same person who backs the art film has to back the monster movie, because it is the monster movie that pays for the next art film.
